From Elsewhere: Syrian Christians, under fire, under threat, under oppression

October 28, 2013

A desecrated Church in Syria

Some of the tales coming out of Syria are truly heartrending. Especially poignant are the stories of how members of minority religions Christians, Druze, Alawites and others have gone from a feeling of relative safety, well as relatively safe as the non-democratic bits of the Middle-East can get, into feeling terror almost every day.

There are gangs of Jihadists, forcing Christians to convert to Islam at gunpoint, armed thugs desecrating churches and generally oppressing the Syrian Christians. Now the Jihadists have engaged on an orgy of book burning, with Christian Bibles and other books consigned to a pyre outside a Greek Catholic Church.

The news service of the Pontifical Mission Societies, Agenzia Fides said:

“Raqqa (Agenzia Fides) – The militia of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the faction that in several regions of Syria monopolized the armed insurrection against the regime in Damascus in recent days have organized a book burning of Bibles and Christian books in front of the Greek – Catholic church of Our Lady of the Annunciation in Raqqa, the Syrian city which has been for months under the control of anti-Assad militias. This information was reported by the indipendent Kurdish Agency – AraNews, known for its critical stance against the Syrian regime and in contact with activists and informers that from Raqqa have leaked the news via social networks.The region of Raqqa was the scene of clashes between the army of Assad and the militias of the opposition in March. After the withdrawal of the government army, internal clashes between the anti-regime Free Syrian Army battalions and groups of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant began. The stated purpose of this faction is the creation of an Islamic caliphate in the areas which have fallen under its control. To do this, civilians are subjected to campaigns of indoctrination and fanaticization – based on jiahdist ideology. Already in September several videos circulating online had documented the vandalism committed against the two churches in the city of Raqqa by militants of ISIL, with the destruction of crosses, statues and sacred images.In Raqqa, in late July, the Roman Jesuit Paolo Dall’Oglio was kidnapped. “

The Jihadists are practicing by burning books, soon, that’s if they are not already, they will be burning people. The Jihadis are trying to re-make Syria to match the image of their own twisted desires, and that Utopian Jihadist Syria, will have no Christians in it, nor any Druze nor any Alawites. It will be a land of the ‘purest Islam’ and the inescapable prison of those who will be too terrified to express an individual thought.